Vince Beiser

Jared Johns, a former soldier and father of two, thought he was swapping text messages with a pretty girl from a dating site. What he didn’t realize was that he was the victim of a scam that would cost him everything.

How one little robot bravely went where no human could, to document the extent of the damage at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant so that Japanese scientists can figure out how to clean it up.

Technology is rapidly improving our ability to find oil and gas. It means “peak oil” may not be as close as we thought, and the United States is becoming less dependent on foreign oil:

“Right now, the map of who sells and who buys oil and natural gas is being radically redrawn. Just a few years ago, imported oil made up nearly two-thirds of the United States’ annual consumption; now it’s less than half. Within a decade, the U.S. is expected to overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia to regain its title as the world’s top energy producer. Countries that have never had an energy industry worth mentioning are on the brink of becoming major players, while established fossil fuel powerhouses are facing challenges to their dominance. We are witnessing a shift that heralds major new opportunities—and dangers—for individual nations, international politics and economics, and the planet.”

The Extreme Affordability program is an experiment with a dramatically different approach to fighting poverty, one that in recent years has generated tremendous buzz among academics, development workers, entrepreneurs and corporate executives. It’s called “bottom of the pyramid” marketing. The idea is to harness capitalism to solve the problems of the world’s poorest — those at the bottom of the global economic pyramid.

Inmates aren’t allowed to have cell phones in any US prison, let alone on death row. But the 21st century’s ubiquitous communications tools are nonetheless turning up by the thousands in lockups not just in Texas but across the US and around the world.